February from Album of Rustic Subjects
1859
Medium
Wood engraving
Dimensions
Sheet: 7 1/2 × 9 5/8 in. (19 × 24.5 cm)
Classification
Prints
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Gift of Howard Mansfield, 1927
Accession Number
27.69.14(a,b)
Art Historical Context
**February from Album of Rustic Subjects** Charles Jacque, a prominent French artist of the 19th century, captures the quiet beauty of rural life in wood engraving from his 1859 *Album of Rustic Subjects*. Jacque, aligned with the Barbizon school's realist tendencies, specialized in pastoral scenes featuring peasants, animals, and the French countryside. As the February installment in this thematic series, the print likely evokes the stark serenity of winter, highlighting the rhythms of agrarian existence during a time of growing Romantic interest in nature's unvarnished truths. Wood engrav...
About the Artist
Charles Jacque
Charles-Émile Jacque (1813–1894) was a pioneering French painter, engraver, and illustrator whose career bridged the worlds of printmaking and pastoral painting. Born in Paris amid a difficult childhood, he apprenticed at age seventeen to a map engraver, mastering drypoint technique and producing his first etching in 1830—a copy of a head after Rembrandt. After serving seven years in the French Ar...